O Shenandoah! Country Reckoning
O Shenandoah! Country Reckoning
This story is based on the participation of Mr. Wiley's great-grandfather in the Battle of New Market, May 15, 1864. It is a blend of fiction and fact with transitions between the actual text of his great-grandfather's letters and historical notes bound by an imaginative tale.
May the 25th - 64 --------------
By February, 1864 the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley was at
a virtual stalemate. The citizens of the Union and its soldiers
were weary of the war, growing disheartened. The Union
desperately needed to push the Rebels out of the Shenandoah
Valley, away from Washington, and finally establish their
superiority in the Valley. But victory continually evaded the
Union, and the call for more volunteers went out again and
again. Three-month enlistments simply did not supply enough
manpower to wage such a campaign.
A. J. Wiley decided he could no longer stand by. He would have
to enlist. He had not been eager to volunteer, or to become a
soldier. He had delayed until what looked like the last months
before the Union's demise to enlist.
A third-generation descendent of Scotch-Irish immigrants,
grandson of a British Revolutionary warship-jumper, A. J.
shared more in common with the rural southerners than with
urban northerners. He came from a long line of harassed poor
folk fighting or fleeing oppression, so he identified with the
plight of Southern slaves, part of what the Civil War was about
for him.
In the early summer of 1852 A. J. and his new bride, Rebecca
Jane Warren, eloped from Glencoe, Ohio and moved closer to the
Ohio River where he worked, building bridges. In 1860 A. J. and
Rebecca Jane and their four children moved across the Ohio
River into Virginia, settling on a small mountain top farm at
Fairview, near Proctor, a few miles down river and uphill from
Ella, later "Moundsville," West Virginia.
A. J. tried farming on the thin-soiled mountain top but
maintained at his carpentry trade, helping build houses, barns,
and a store, church, and school house at Fairview. Rebecca
became the first school teacher there. They had two more
children before the call came for volunteers in the War.
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James Wiley is an Ohio-born and raised writer and amateur genealogist, working with cousins from Maine to California to research their ancestry. With his wife, Lu, Jim visits the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge mountains every year, enjoying the scenery, warm hospitality, and personal attachment to the vivid history of the Shenandoah Valley. Besides his several ancestors who lived in Virginia from early colonial days to distant cousins of the present, Jim shares the history of many Americans whose families were split over the Civil War, sometimes pitting them against each other in battle.
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